The Nation's Pulse
Rusthoven, Peter J.
"The Nation's Pulse" On December 22 of last year, the New York Times published a long front-page article, under the byline of Seymour Hersh, about unauthorized covert activities aHegedly carried on by the Central...
...Among considerable competition, Senator William Proxmire (D.-Wis...
...Quite simply, I suspect that much of the criticism of the two agencies springs not so much from a belief that either has "overstepped" its authority, as it does from a growing attitude that any covert activities undertaken in the name of national security or defense are somehow silly and illegitimate...
...We have the silly, paranoid outlook "that there's something evil out there, something attacking us...
...Or consider the government investigation of the deaths of three civil rights workers slain in Mississippi in the early 1960s...
...Both former director Helms and current director William Colby have denied outright many of those allegations while qualifying the validity of others...
...Now it is hardly surprising that the issue of covert surveillance of American citizens by investigatory agencies of their federal government has come in for widespread critical commentary...
...Director Colby, we are told, has "the mentality of a Heinrich Himmler," and is "the kind of guy who is best qualified to run a concentration camp...
...Many of the "disclosures" about the CIA and FBI are couched in the standard hedging language of newspaper reportage—to wit, "sources" that "allege...
...rather, it is that justifying such activities in terms of national defense and national security strikes him as "unthinking...
...Instead, both the investigation itself and the resulting convictions were widely applauded...
...In large part, the pursuit promises to reflect the idea that the United States can eliminate, by an act of sheer will, any need for covert intelligence operations...
...to be frank, I have some qualms about contributing to the authors' royalties...
...Clearly, if such men lead shady lives outside the public eye, they may be vulnerable to outside pressure based on threats to disclose those things they would rather keep private, and any government concerned about protecting vital secrets should be aware of such vulnerability...
...In part, one can see this by comparing the current reaction to that which occurred—or rather, did not occur—when similar activities were undertaken for purposes which many of today's critics no doubt considered legitimate...
...But the most striking feature of the interview lies in Marchetti's view of what is at the base of the CIA's predilection for evil...
...Thus, it is possible that much of the current furor is based on reporting of questionable accuracy about activities which may themselves be largely legitimate...
...In any event, the Times continued running stories for a few weeks, other members of the media continued to follow suit, and any number of Congressmen were at pains to declaim that they yielded to no man in their disapproval of domestic spying...
...The authors are former intelligence agents and their work is a self-proclaimed expose...
...In like manner, any direct associations of a Congressman with groups or individuals of questionable loyalty is a matter of proper governmental concern...
...In much the same way—without, of course, having any firsthand knowledge—I can easily understand the CIA's finding it necessary, in the course of discharging its unique responsibilities, to keep tabs on some ten thousand individuals out of a population that exceeds two hundred million...
...Any number of Senators and Representatives are in positions where they have, of necessity, access to highly classified national security information...
...Eventually, the President resorted, amid cries of "whitewash," to the expedient of appointing the so-called "blue ribbon" commission chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, which will, in the standard phrase, "investigate and make recommendations...
...Were this the extent of the matter, one might well dismiss the entire affair as merely another example of the unreliability of media coverage of "scandals" and the seemingly limitless capacity of many public figures to respond to such coverage in ways that are neither serious nor reflective...
...Some 168 passages in the published version are left blank and marked "Deleted...
...I have little doubt that within a year Marchetti will have been lionized on talk shows and campuses from coast to coast...
...Meanwhile, Senator Adlai Stevenson III (D.-111...
...I have not read this book...
...Rather, the predominant reaction was that a somewhat unsavory union boss had gotten his due...
...But I did run across an interview with Marchetti in the January 1975 issue of Penthouse—a magazine whose own exposes usually exhibit a more erotic, pictorial emphasis—that merits comment...
...One may rest assured that neither the Russians nor the Chinese will join us in this quest for a nobler, less secretive international community, and that any hasty, unilateral acts of purification on our own part will do little to promote either freedom at home or stability abroad...
...Consider for a moment the FBI's files on Congressmen...
...The past several months have witnessed publication of a truly unique book—The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, by Victor Marchetti with John D. Marks...
...Moreover, this response strikes me as being, to a degree, a perfectly healthy one...
...We are all put off by the idea of J. Edgar Hoover regaling LBJ with juicy tidbits of gossip gleaned from these files, and are generally sensitive to the potential for abuse in any governmental activity of this sort...
...However, those who are convinced that wherever the news media finds smoke there must be a fire might consider than even the New Republic—hardly a friend of either the Administration or the CIA—has questioned both the accuracy and the reportorial integrity of current coverage of the agency's activities (see Walter Pincus, "Covering Intelligence," in the February 1, 1975 issue...
...is portrayed as a man with "a religious need to hate something," who would have been "really great in Spain during the Inquisition," and (believe it or not) as "simpleminded...
...But the Marchetti mentality should make us equally chary of joining the full-scale pursuit of the CIA and FBI that threatens to develop in the nation's capitol...
...Recall, for a moment, Robert F. Kennedy's pursuit of Jimmy Hoffa when the former was attorney general and the latter the head of the Teamsters Union...
...The problem to Marchetti —and he is far from alone—is not what the CIA or FBI are doing per se...
...William F. Buckley, Jr...
...However, given the extreme importance of the information to which some Congressmen must be exposed, and given the fact that some real snowbirds have managed to persuade the electorate to elevate them to national office, I can see little overall difficulty, in principle, with having an investigatory agency of the federal government keep an eye on the activities of our 535 national representatives...
...completely improper...
...not clear that even those revelations which are factual necessarily indicate that the activities of either the CIA or the FBI have been...
...This story was, of course, immediately picked up by the networks and the wire services, and created a predictable hubbub among -the nation's political leaders...
...After all, doesn't this reflect the discredited mentality of the Cold War...
...Is it not at best a sham, and at worst a cover for something far more sinister...
...Again, no respectable spokesman took the government to task for its methods...
...It's an unthinking reaction" (emphasis supplied...
...President Ford, then in the midst of his much publicized Christmas ski vacation at Vail, Colorado, demanded in turn an immediate report from the current management of the CIA, and assured newsmen that nothing of the type reported by Hersh was going on now—thereby fueling speculation that it had indeed gone on in the past...
...In it, Marchetti speaks volumes—not about the CIA, but rather about the perspective of those who are most vociferous in their criticism of our government's intelligence efforts...
...The government campaign to get Hoffa on jury tampering charges involved both infiltration of the Teamsters and use of a personal friend of Hoffa as a paid informant...
...But can it really be that tactics which warrant approval (or at least acquiescence) when one is nailing a corrupt labor leader or a murderous Klansman—can it really be that these tactics merit withering contempt when they are pursued in the name of national security...
...It suffers, he feels, from the naive belief that the United States has "a responsibility to contain Communism, keep the world free [sic) for democracy, and all that sort of stuff" (emphasis supplied...
...There are recent indications, I submit, that this difference in ends may indeed be responsible for much current criticism of the CIA and FBI...
...The American public has grown accustomed of late to viewing official denials with an immediate skepticism that passes in some quarters for political sophisticaion, and it may well scoff at self-serving statements by heads of the CIA...
...Those who are familiar with the extreme sensitivity of the judiciary to "prior restraints" on free speech will understand how really remarkable this is...
...I suspect that both the CIA and the FBI have indeed, on occasion, exceeded their authority...
...The present discourse about the CIA and FBI involves, however, an additional and more serious factor...
...Yet there was no public outcry at the time against the government's "shoddy" tactics, nor any frenzied shout that our liberties werein danger...
...Second, it is...
...Nevertheless, before we persuade ourselves that the recent revelations about the CIA and FBI are fine fodder for another scandal N la Watergate, it might be worthwhile to pause for a moment in an attempt to put this sudden pother about domestic spying in some perspective...
...There are, as one might expect, the predictable cheap shots...
...Congress had aspecial interest in this particular exercise in internal intelligence, however: according to Time, the major targets of the FBI's questionable inquiries were the worthy members of the House and Senate themselves...
...won the prize for the most thoughtful, deliberative, and reflective response to Hersh's as yet unsubstantiated charges, by immediately demanding that former CIA director Richard Helms resign as Ambassador to Iran and return to Washington to face the wrath of a congressional inquiry...
...According to the Times, the CIA had conducted in the last few years a "massive illegal domestic intelligence operation," which included infiltration of political groups and organizations and maintaining secret files on some ten thousand Americans...
...For his view is truly the bottom line of the current pother...
...Apparently, the Bureau has any number of files filled with information of varying reliability about the sexual proclivities, drinking habits, and sundry other peccadillos of our national representatives, a fact which has moved several members to flights of angry rhetoric...
...Similarly, there is no hard evidence that any of the FBI files on Congressman have been used for the dark purposes so readily ascribed to them by Senator McGee...
...Now I have virtually no sympathy for Jimmy Hoffa, and a fair amount of positive antipathy for the Ku Klux Klan...
...And finally, Marchetti gives his explanation of why nothing will change with the elevation of Gerald Ford to the Presidency: "He's caught up in the old Cold War thing the way most conservatives are...
...The first thing one should keep in mind is that these revelations are not divine in origin, devotees of the Times notwithstanding...
...Clearly, Marchetti has developed a few first-class hatreds of his own...
...has opined that "obviously," the files are "to be held in reserve for some kind of blackmail...
...What is unique about this effort is that it is, to the best of my knowledge, the first book in our history to be censored before publication by the government, with the direct approval of the courts...
...Senator Gale McGee (D.-Wyo...
...no Senator decried the imminence of the "police state...
...A few weeks later, Washington again got itself into a huff, this time over domestic surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation...
...But the incidents described above do indicate that when the ends are perceived as just, activities similar to those denounced today are considered perfectly legitimate...
...In this case, there was infiltration of a private political organization (the Ku Klux Klan), use of paid informants, and official surveillance of a large number of individuals...
...In short, it appears likely that many of the scandalous "disclosures" being bandied about at present will turn` out to be overstated, inflammatory, and generally inaccurate...
...For example, Colby has pointed out that six thousand of the ten thousand CIA files on United States citizens represent the results of routine overseas checks requested by other government agencies...
...All babbling about an impending "police state" aside, complacent acquiescence in large-scale internal intelligence gathering would be a sorry comment on national attitudes toward civil liberties...
...The testimony of that informant, which proved critical in securing a conviction, included details of Hoffa's conversations with his attorney—conversations which Hoffa undoubtedly thought were confidential and whose revelation by a paid government agent could arguably be seen as a violation of the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of right to counsel...
...He's all for national security and national defense...
...has warned his less alert colleagues that "the danger of the police state is no longer unreal...
...And recent events should havealerted all of us, if it was still necessary, to the dangers of casually justifying such excesses as demanded by national security...
...In Hoffa v. United States {1966), the Supreme Court rejected that argument in affirming Hoffa's conviction, but until then the law was at best ambiguous on the issue...
...As of this writing, a Senate select committee is busily engaged in investigating the whole matter to evaluate the substance of these and other charges...
...On December 22 of last year, the New York Times published a long front-page article, under the byline of Seymour Hersh, about unauthorized covert activities aHegedly carried on by the Central Intelligence Agency within the United States...
Vol. 8 • May 1975 • No. 8
